Goodbye

The final installment of the Incursion expansion is upon us, and pod pilots throughout New Eden will soon find themselves with new faces and (wonder of wonders!) bodies.

Come summer, we will find ourselves walking about in, we trust, beautifully-rendered windowless environments, sporting beautifully-designed attire chosen to express our beautifully-diverse personalities and perhaps even our shifting moods. I don't know what I'm likely to see as I walk through those empty low-sec stations where I only dock because they feature repair facilities or because I have an insta-undock, but it might be interesting to walk around one of the Raneilles (0.5) stations in hopes of bumping into a former suicide-gankee. That's still a ways off, however. What I'm interested in currently is what happens in less than a week, when we all begin designing our new selves, pimping swank new duds, adorning ourselves with accessories and grooming our respective coiffures--again. (I know it's not the same as before--because we get to make bodies this time)

It is an exciting time, and although I probably sound sarcastic that's just my nature. I really do look forward to trying out the new character creator, with all its realistic nuance, but I also admit to a slight melancholy over the loss of my old portrait.

Like many people when they begin playing Eve, I spent a good bit of time trying to get my character to look just right, oblivious to the fact that he would never be anything more than a static portrait. I think I spent half an hour or more--I can't remember--teasing out a slight look of sadness from Bart's eyes, so that my victims in space would know that I was a little bit sorry for blowing them up, or if I was not exactly sorry for blowing them up, that I at least pitied them. From the beginning I had every intention of becoming what I am today--a dangerous man; a low-sec pirate--but even though I knew that much, I had no idea at the moment of his creation that Bart would never be able to move around outside a ship. That's changing now, of course, but in the future will it really be Bart looking out from my enemy's info panel?

As with all leading questions, the answer is both yes and no. The same player will be in control. Bart will still be killing and dying based on my brilliant moves and idiotic mistakes (not to mention pure luck, both good and bad, and the action, or inaction, of my enemies). Bart will still have roughly the same skills, a little more advanced, and his player will still have the same tendencies and inconsistencies. However, that carefully-wrought expression will be gone, and with it some of Bart's personality.

I haven't decided whether I will attempt to recreate my original portrait or try something entirely new--I won't know enough about the options until next week--but whatever I do, change is unavoidable. I've thought about this with regard to my corpmates as well. They will all have new faces. I've known some of these guys for a couple of years now ingame, and while it's true that I associate them with their voices and fitting/flying styles, I have also developed a mental connection with their digital faces. It's going to be a bit disorienting.

Anyone who has spent a long time in a single corp will know that over time you pick up information about one another's Real Lives--a tidbit here, a detail there: someone's real name, someone's real job, a little hint of family or personal trouble or triumph, a snapshot in the corp forums. These are placed in the mental ledger alongside notions of your m8's personality based on his day-to-day vent conversation, his chats, his forum posts, his links, his failures and successes ingame, what excites or irritates him, and so forth. The Real Life stuff and the ingame stuff fuse in interesting ways (assuming you don't know all your corpies IRL) to create your notion of that corpmate's identity.

All this stuff needs a marker, a symbol--it has to be attached to something. In Eve, that something is partially just a name in chat (and indeed some call Tranquility a glorified chat server), but it's also partially a voice in comms, and it's also a face--a face designed by a person you know more than casually and less than intimately, which is to say: about as well as you can know any purely online acquaintance. As I was preparing this post, I looked carefully at some of the portraits of my corpmates, imagining them at work on these faces. I imagine that I learned new things about some of them--vague, intuitive stuff that I can't express, but human stuff nonetheless. No doubt I'm overthinking (something I'm prone to) but there it is. Anyhow, I'm going to miss the old faces just a little, and so I've created this memorial.

Goodbye old Tusker faces.